Search Engine Optimization Programs | SEO Tutorial Program

Redirects

Redirecting of pages is actually a white hat search engine tactic. It is basically used to redirect pages from one page to another automatically. It may be used to redirect a visitor from a doorway page that has no valuable content to another page that is beneficial to the webmaster like a sales page for a product, or a signup for a newsletter.

Sometimes redirects are needed for pretty legitimate reasons; like if you have to rename a page in the website, for some reason or another. You can redirect visitors to the new web page with the new name of your website. Sometimes you may have to change the entire naming convention of the website or perhaps have to change the configuration of the site. With this, it is important that you move the pages of your websites to different folders. Visitors will thus have to be redirected to these new pages. Sometimes, you may just have to use a redirect because you forgot to add some valuable keywords to your site matter.

Once you create a new web page in your already set website, you may have to rename the page and discard the old page. This is not that practical as once you discard the page, the new page ends with a 0 PR. In such situations, it is more practical to use a redirect to the new page. Some people may turn to duplicating the content of the page so that both the old page and the new page have the same content. However, this is not a good solution as search engines may penalize you, suspecting the duplicate pages to be a scam through the implementation of ‘duplicate content’ technique. This is why redirects are more appreciable in such conditions.

You may use a custom error message for the new page; but this will make you end up losing rankings on the next update of the search engine as the files appears dormant. Using this method may also irritate visitors, who find the custom error message when surfing your site, as they would again have to dig through the site for the information that they need. This is why it is better to use a redirect in such conditions.

There are situations where it is necessary to use a redirect in a page because a page has been removed from the website. You can set up your website in such a way that traffic that is meant for the old page will turn up in some other page. One feasible page for all this traffic to reach is the site map or home page of your website. With this, you benefit in two ways, the visitor does not leave the website because he can look for more information from the home page, and there are more visitors to different parts of your website. This is because on reaching the home page, these visitors learn about the different pages and services available in the website.

There may be cases where redirects may be required when domains are changed. However, this proves to be a trickier situation than creating a redirect for a web page. This is because with redirect for a domain, all the pages of the old domain have to be unique and be equal to the pages of the new domain. There is no point in redirecting the old URLs of the website of the old domain to the home page of the new domain. This is because visitors to the site may wonder what exactly they are doing in the wrong website.

Sometimes you may not choose to do a 301 redirect. In such cases, a 302 has to be done from the old to new site. With this, you can keep an eye on the new site, and confirm that they are listed in search engines. However, this has to be a patient wait that may take a few months. Once you are sure that the redirected pages end up in the search engines, you can modify the 302 redirect to a 301 redirect. You can also reduce the possibility of the website ending in the Google SandBox because of this.

So it can be seen that though redirect are sometimes used as a black hat technique, it proves to be very beneficial to webmasters having to change domains or pages.